Wednesday, 9 May 2012

August Out Now

The album is released to coincide with the opening of the exhibition Arcam by Joel Clifford at the Orange Dot Gallery in Bloomsbury, London.

The collaboration between illustrator and professional printmaker Joel Clifford and musician Arcam takes the form of a series specialist screen print series created in response to each track of Arcam's debut album, August. Each artwork has been assigned a QR code. By scanning these codes with a smartphone, visitors can stream the audio track associated with each artwork on their phone as they make their way through the exhibition.Joel Clifford is an illustrator and professional printmaker based in London. His style has a graphic sensibility and is informed by the layering nature of screen print. He doesnʼt draw; instead he thinks in collage, mentally layering and combining shapes, colours and found imagery. He collects inspiration from all over, using found imagery and experimenting with the textures and half-tones of the original image. He ʻforms a narrative with whatʼs around himʼ, drawing upon the past and mixing in contemporary aesthetics.Arcam is a guitarist and laptop artist who spent most of the late 90s and early 00s plying his trade in bands with a shoegaze aesthetic. Focusing on his solo project from 2006 he self-released a limited edition EP Moorings in 2007 before starting work on his debut album August. Over the development of the album he has collaborated with a number of film makers to produce a series of videos to tracks from the album and a multi-media performance at the Dislocation Festival in 2008. August is comprised of recordings formed entirely of sounds originating from a single source: the guitar. While the tonal qualities of an electric six-string are evident throughout, they appear here in a modified state, having been digitally re-rendered through extensive laptop processing to form tones, drones, swells and surges, resonant textures, clicks and cuts in structured ambient compositions.Recorded intermittently between 2007 and 2012, the album was written as a single composition in which each track contributes to an overarching narrative exploring themes of time, memory and loss. Titles reference changes in seasons and the movement of the sea is a recurring metaphor. These themes and a mutual aesthetic ideals related to sight, sound and environment shared by Arcam and Clifford have formed the foundations to their interactive exhibition opening on 10 May 2012.